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The pace of our everyday lives is increasing all the time. We’re facing more and more demands on our time and energy and less and less time to fulfill those demands. It’s easy to, as a result, get caught in the frantic trap of “busyness,” which saps our attention and time away from those goals we should really be focusing on.
This cheat sheet will show you (without any fluff and with actionable advice) how to protect your focus, manage your time, and manage your energy so that you can perform at your peak productivity and accomplish those things that are most important to you. From goal setting and prioritizing, to selection of mental models, to minimizing distractions and entering a state of flow, to using creativity and innovation to propel yourself forward, you will find in these pages everything you need to eliminate unnecessary timesucks and zone in on the tasks and projects that are most important in helping you achieve your goals.
Before we get started, though, it would be useful to take a look at what we mean when we say “productivity.”
A very simple definition of the term provides that productivity equals value divided by time and/or resources. In other words, productivity is the efficient use of time, resources, materials, energy, et cetera. Productivity, put most simply, is what we call our attempts to find the best and highest uses of our time and resources with the least wasted effort. It’s a matter of output measured against input.
Those who have higher productivity are able to provide or attain more value with the same amount of time/resources/materials/energy than are those with lower productivity. It follows, then, that one can improve his or her productivity by either (1) increasing the value create using the same amount of time, resources, and energy or (2) decrease the amount of time, resources, and energy used while still creating the same amount of value.
There are all sorts of complicated ways to view and measure personal productivity, but, really, it comes down to one thing: how much time do you have to use to do things that matter less in order to be able to do the things that matter the most? This is where the difficulty lies—it can be tough to balance these (often countervailing) forces, but this balance is so important. After all, we each only have one life, and it’s up to us to figure out how to use it as best we can.